


Doomed

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Paris, F/F, Face Slapping, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mary Lou Barebone is Her Own Warning, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 07:48:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19998424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: The year is 1832 and Credence Bellebosse has somehow found himself in league with magical criminals. Handsome ones.





	Doomed

Some days Credence still thought of the scullery in the convent of the Petit Picpus. Eating breakfast, he would pause to remember hunger. Asleep, he dreamt of hands on his shoulder, blows to his cheek, boxed ears, the flying ash from the hearth that burnt holes in his sleeve and left pinprick scars on the skin of his hands and cheeks and chin. It was as though the banal terror of that place had been woven into the hairs at the back of his neck. Any little thing could set it off, stealing his attention from whatever task at hand, sending him back.

His primary memories, the ones that really gripped him, were of its unforgiving flagstone floors, which he felt even now as an ache in his kneecap and on the dark, roughly healed patches that decorated his knuckles. The ache was worst in the mornings getting up, or evenings after a long bout of walking, or when he was hungry, or when it was cold, when he reached for something, when it rained, when he happened to drop an object he was holding and was forced to bend to pick it up. Usually now he felt it most in the presence of M. Grindelwald (who still and most scandalously insisted that Credence call him Gellert).

This puzzled him. It was not that M. Grindelwald had ever been cruel to him. On the contrary, the circumstances of his life had much improved upon his taking up employ with Mssrs. Grindelwald and Graves. He hardly ever went to bed with an empty belly anymore, for one, and his suit was mostly new and nicely cut and relatively recent in fashion. A far cry from the rough grey sackcloth clothes he had been made to wear for much of his prior life by the Mère Supérieureof Picpus.

He was usually clean down to the fingernails now and had no chores. He had enough money in his pocket for a macaron most days, or at the very least a bit of cake, and there was the pleasant companionship of his tortoise Pierre, or Petrus, depending on his mood, and the actresses on the third floor of his boarding house who were always kind to him, and the artist, M. Lehmann, who paid him a franc sometimes to stand still for an hour before his young German apprentices, and M. Grindelwald himself, who often brought him a bit of cake or a pillow of soft white bread or a jug of wine to “keep up his spirits” when work was thin and far between.

And there were nights too, many nights even, when he had the pleasure of good company. His teachers, or students in cafes, the girls he had met and visited when he had the chance, who always laughed when he blushed and turned his head so as not to see them changing into their going-out clothes. And when they took him dancing it was always great fun, a grand night of it, and they laughed so prettily when they kissed his cheeks, and they carded his hair as he slept at the foot of their straw-stuffed beds, like a pocketful of so many little mothers upon which he could call as often as he pleased, so long as they weren’t in the company of the students and married men who paid their rents.

Truly, life was good now. So good that he felt compelled to cross himself and pray a round on his rosary in the mornings when he got up, the wooden beads clacking between his fingers, Pierre sipping water from a cracked dish in the corner of their shared room.

Still, the floors haunted him. His knees ached in memory of the many hours he had spent upon them, either on a scattering of birdseed in punishment and penitence or with the bucket and brush, cleaning. Just that morning they had begun to creak and twinge, as the letter arrived from M. Grindelwald bearing his name “Credence” (which he could now read) and the the little code that M. had devised for him. Two crossed lines and one straight - their meeting time (just after noon) and place (this one was more difficult and he had to squint to remember if the straight up and down line referred to the Cafe Moulin or the Cafe Jaffe).

He read the note three times. Long enough to be certain that the straight line did indeed refer to the Cafe Jaffe in the Rue Grangé. Relief settled the anxious early-morning gnawing in his empty stomach. The Rue Grangé was close enough that he could make it in under ten minutes at a run. It was still early. He could afford to sit first with Pierre and finish off the rest of the cake and a little wine.  
He let the rosary fall slack in his other hand and was preparing to discard of the letter in his usual way when M. Grindelwald’s tawny owl snatched it back, nipping at his fingers, and took off through the cracked window.

This was, Credence thought, most likely the source of his anxiety, and thus also the wellspring of memory in which he was currently bathing. Less the owl than the wider context of the owl. It was the tiny details, like the little flame that appeared on the wick of an unlit candle with a mere wave of M. Graves’ broad palm. The blanket that had folded itself at the foot of his mattress one evening when M. Grindelwald was growing impatient with his lateness. It was the smallness of magic, its habit of existing in the darkest, least significant of corners in which he would never have thought to look for it. That made him feel sick. And excited.

At home (at the Convent, he mentally corrected himself), the very idea of magic had terrified him from the moment he’d performed his first unwitting spell. Then it was witchcraft to him. Then he slept on a wooden pallet in the scullery, the lone boy in a woman’s kingdom, confined to his singular stone prison under the beady eye of Chasteté, the eldest orphan and next in line for the ascension, if anyone had asked her opinion. That was his magic-less and dull little corner. The kitchen, the cupboards, the little stretch of corridor which he was required to keep clean at all times. It had been windowless and hot even in winter. He fantasied regularly about letting the fires go out so that he might get some rest from tending to them, and then they were out. And then they returned. Quicker than he could have snapped his fingers. Again and again, heart pounding.

It had only taken him one brush with the Mère Supérieureand her favourite switch to cure him of his fascination for this new talent.

Now there was magic everywhere. And it was magic, he had been assured, not witchcraft. Nothing sinful. M. Grindelwald had even claimed that witches once held audience and favour with the old king before he had been disposed of. For that, Credence was willing to overlook some of his worries. Had he not spent his earliest years in infancy on his knees alongside all of the nuns, praying fervently for the return of peace and stability and the ancien regime? Even the Mère Supérieure- he stuffed a fistful of dryish cake into his mouth and chewed quickly - would have to admit that she had been wrong, wouldn’t she? If M. Grindelwald were to be believed (and Credence very much wanted to believe him), then it was witches after all to whom they owed the current state of affairs, Bourbon king and all.

He left the final cake crumbs on a scrap of waxed paper for Pierre to finish so that he could change out of his sleeping clothes. The new suit had been purchased for him by M. Graves, from his own tailor. He ran his fingers lightly over the green wool jacket and vest before pulling them over his shirt. The sun was higher now, slanted light through the window. Soon it would be directly overhead, he knew, which would mean he was late. That he could not allow. Credence had learned quickly the limits to M. Grindelwald’s patience and indulgence, two long parallel roads that ended abruptly on impact with the back of his hand.

Once dressed, he combed the snarls from his hair and located his cap beneath the wrapping paper from yesterday’s bread. Pierre, like his apostolic namesake, came on the third call to be fitted into his lead, which was more or less a length of silk ribbon knotted like a belt around his shell, and allowed himself to be lead out into the hall.

The hall was disappointingly empty as Credence breezed down its rickety stairs. Many of the students, he remembered, would be busy at work painting scenes of rotted fruit scattered across M. Lehmann’s bockety table and would not resurface until well after noon. Too late to see him or to notice what a fine form he cut now in the green jacket and vest. Too absent to notice his hasty departure with Pierre, or to ask where he was going and be told with a sly nod of the head that he was going nowhere in particular, nowhere at all. Or to wonder if he were lying or telling the truth. Or to follow him down the street as he crossed now, Pierre under his arm, darting past a handcart and a laundrywoman and a crowd of small children who disbanded with a cry and trailed him nearly to the corner, begging to hold his pet in exchange for wooden marbles and bits of string.

What he wanted, Credence realised, was a friendly neighbour. Someone like one of the two sisters who lived upstairs and were always walking arm in arm or calling up to the upstairs window for the other to drop a key. Much of his life had been spent trying to avoid unwanted attention. He wanted it desperately now. Or at the very least, he wanted someone to ask after him when he left his little room in the Rue Michodière, a friend he could confide in, on pain of death or excommunication, that he was going to meet a pair of gentlemen to whom he had become a someone of significance. It was not a piece of news he had ever expected to be able to relay about himself. Not having anyone with which to break his vow of secrecy made the whole thing feel transient, the sort of vivid dream he might have shortly before waking up to relight the hearth at home.

*

Mssrs. Grindelwald and Graves occupied their usual table in the far back corner of the Cafe Jaffe. They had, Credence noted, already consumed two of three bottles of wine on the table between them. Or rather, M. Graves had likely consumed one-and-three-quarter bottles while Grindelwald - Gellert - nursed the same cup. Before the theory could be tested, Grindelwald was on his feet. He cut the space between them in three short strides, taking Credence’s chin in the palm of his fist and tilting it upward so that they were forced to make eye contact.

“What is your name?”

Credence had learned not to let his worry at these interrogations show through. He answered easily and without giving in to the urge to glance away: “Credence Bellebosse.”

“Your original name?”

“ _Croyance Bellebosse._ ”

“Born?”

“In Paris, in the Convent of the P’tit Picpus, m’sieur.”

“When we first met - ”

“- I walked in front of your carriage and was nearly killed, but you stopped the horses with - with it and saved me.”

The grip around his jaw relaxed fractionally. Grindelwald’s eyes bore into his and then softened. He let go and patted the side of Credence’s head with a smile.

“How clever you’ve become,” he said warmly, slinking an arm around Credence’s shoulder. “But your lunch is going cold. Come, _Spatzi_. What did you eat for breakfast? Not cake again?”

Credence allowed his body to be guided by the hand around his shoulder, across the floor and into the seat of a chair across from Graves, who scowled.

“You always ask the same questions and get the same answers,” Graves complained. His eyes flickered perfunctorily over Credence as he spoke; only Grindelwald was important enough, Credence knew, to hold his attention for long. “Cake for breakfast, a drop of wine in the afternoon. He eats like a child. What are you expecting him to say? That he dined on fresh oysters and turbot in a fine caper sauce?”

“Let the boy eat as he pleases, Percival,” said Grindelwald, tipping wine from an open bottle into a third glass before refilling Graves’. “Not all of us had the blessings of plentyin our youth. Leave him be.”

Credence bent his head over the empty plate before him. Counted to ten. Trailed his fingers over the rim of the freshly-poured cup. It was better not to seem as though he were listening too closely when they spoke over his head like this, especially not when he was the subject. Experience told him to bite his tongue. (His knees throbbed warningly). He watched Grindelwald’s long, pale fingers around the hilt of his wand, slicing bread, skinning butter from a slab into thin curls. Across from him, Graves had lit a candle with the hand-wave that still inspired awe in Credence, small miracle that it was. Jesus on water. He blinked at the dancing flame as Graves continued his complaints.

“Anything for ‘little sparrow’. Did you know the women in his building call him “little flea”? Another ridiculous nickname you might want to consider. You certainly seem to be having difficulty of late eradicating him from your bed.”

“‘Little flea’,” Grindelwald mused. Honey poured from a jar and arranged itself artfully over the bread and butter as he slid the plate across the table to Credence. “The little _pique-puce_ from Picpus. I like that.”

His fingers were longer than Graves’, Credence noticed. They were lengthened still by the style in which he wore his nails, which were clean and perfectly ovular. Soft. Hands that had never held a knife to cut into a loaf of hard black bread nor pushed a brush of dirty water across a flagstone floor. Credence bit obediently into the first slice of bread, licked honey from his lip. He watched Grindelwald’s fingers twitch on the tabletop and licked again, though the spot was already clean.

“You and your wretched puns,” sneered Graves, though the fight had gone out of him.

“Are you jealous? You know I never mind to share.”

“I have no interest in fleas and sparrows.”

“Then leave him to his cake and stop tormenting him so. The boy can hardly speak a word in your presence. It’s very boring.”

“Boy,” said Graves.

The break in script was not quite enough to shock Credence, who was used to being shocked and thrown off his guard in worse ways. He froze over his plate anyway, heart pounding, honey and bread half-chewed and heavy on his tongue.

Graves lifted his cup as though to make a toast.

“Speak up. I know you’ve been listening. Give us an opinion on something.”

From the corner of his sight, Credence could see that Grindelwald had pushed back his chair and was glancing between them both with something like amusement on the curl of his lips. Emboldened, he opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and said softly, “I always enjoyed the pun of ‘Picpus’, m’sieur Graves.”

He could not bring himself to meet Graves’ hard eyes, stared instead at the bushy line of brow above them, the point of his chin, the wide stretch of his open palm on the table.

“He speaks,” said Graves, turning back to Grindelwald. “Are you satisfied?”

“Credence,” said Grindelwald, ignoring him. He flicked his wand over the table, curved and flicked it again so that a form glowed red and hot in the wood, as though it had been branded. “Do you remember this letter from your lessons?”  
Something in his tone pricked at the edge of Credence’s newly-forming sense of pride. Sometimes, or often even, he had the feeling that Grindelwald was patronising him. Speaking to him like a child or an idiot, the way Chasteté had when he dropped pots of soapy water across the floor or forgot to peel as many potatoes as the cook would need for dinner. He brushed the sensation away with alarm and relaxed his face back into what he hoped was a neutral expression, curious and respectful. Clever.

“Er,” he said. The shape of the letter was familiar to his finger as it traced over the warm curve, the curled tail.

“A hint. It begins my name and Percival’s as well, and is the name of the street outside this door.”

“Grangé,” said Credence quickly, a knot loosening in his throat. “Grand ‘G’.”

“Yes, it’s the big ‘G’, and another pun for your enjoyment.”

“Thank you, m’sieur.”

“Gellert,” Grindelwald corrected. He had replaced the empty spots on Credence’s plate with more bread and butter and strawberry jam, though his wand was on his lap.

“Thank you, Gellert,” said Credence cautiously. He tried to force a grin. It felt stiff and unnatural on his lips. “I enjoyed it very much.”

“Ha,” said Graves coldly, draining his cup. “Ha. Ha. He sings, all right, your sparrow — and lies through his pretty little beak.”

*

The purpose of their meeting was to be revealed not in the cafe, but on the padded back seat of a fiacre summoned by Grindelwald so quickly, Credence thought he must have conjured it into the street by magic.

“Today we visit another lady,” said Grindelwald as their carriage pulled out into the bustling anonymity of the Blvd Montmartre.

“A very fussy one,” Graves added. He pressed tobacco into the bowl of a carved black pipe and snapped his fingers, swearing as the little flame that had sprung from them was extinguished by a jostle of the wheels. “And non-magical this time. Widowed with no children. I’ve lightly Confunded her. You’ll be her nephew when you call in on her. Her sister’s youngest son, the one everyone forgets about. Which should come naturally enough to you.”

“Because you are so gifted an actor,” said Grindelwald pointedly.

He was jotting notes into a little book in his lap and had not looked up to see Graves’ scowl or Credence’s hands twisted around the knobs of his knees. Credence watched the flight of his hand across the page as he absorbed the rest of the instructions delivered in the same disinterested, placid tone. He was to say that he had been sent by his mother to look in on “Aunt Josephine”, the family gossip having been that she felt poorly, that she missed appointment and took no callers. If she seemed suspicious of him, it was likely because she suspected him of having been sent to scout out the estate in the event of her death, and so he must be entertaining (difficult, he thought), even charming (unlikely), and gain her trust (impossible) so that she might confide in him some stray detail about her jewellery.

“Especially rings,” said Grindelwald, snapping his book shut and laying a hand on Credence’s knee. His touch was warm, familiar. Credence fought the simultaneous urge to squirm away and bury himself in Grindelwald’s side as the list continued with objects he should be sure to listen for: “Family herlooms, pendants, earrings, as well - anything with a stone set inside it.”

Their carriage hit another bump and then was forced to stop for traffic. All had fallen silent while Credence memorised his instructions. He wished he had the nerve to ask if they could crack open a window, as the smoke from Graves’ pipe had turned a particularly noxious shade of green. The idea, however, of making any requests of his teachers, or colleagues, or whatever they were, was still enough to cause him to break out into goosepimples. He settled instead for a gentle inquiry into the task at hand.

“Should I ask to see them?”

“The jewellry?” Grindelwald asked at the same time that Graves barked, “Absolutely not!”

“You must be subtle,” said Grindelwald. The air in the fiacre had cleared by a snap of his long fingers. Credence blinked in the sudden clarity. His head swam at the unexpected influx of oxygen. Graves’ pipe, he realised, was no where to be seen.

“And don’t ask too many questions,” said Graves.

“You may and should ask of us however many questions you need in order to understand the task ahead of you,” Grindelwald amended. “But the Lady Josephine ought to be left in peace, or she’ll only have cause to suspect you.”

While he spoke, his hand did not stray from Credence’s knee and instead squeezed tightly until the skin beneath his long ovular nails prickled from lack of blood. As though he could sense this, he released his grip with a light pat that sent a shock into Credence’s groin, and pointed out the window.

They were passing the Place Vendôme. Over the shoulder of M. Graves and with the frame of the fiacre window further obscuring his view, Credence could make out little more than its bronze column towering over rooftops, already greening. He pretended to listen while Grindelwald explained the details of its erection, rather than focus on the hand that returned to gently knead his knee.

Grindelwald recounted his wizard’s version of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz, the dragons involved, the non-magiques whose memories had been wiped when they caught a glimpse of the wrong end of the battle. He loved to talk politics, Credence noticed. Non-magical politics, witchs’ politics, it hardly mattered for Grindelwald, although nothing put the fire into his cold blue eyes like a discussion on the law that kept witches separated from non-magical people, that kept them in hiding.

( _And that is why you were deposited in a convent, dear Spatzilein_ , he had hissed as his fingers trailed over Credence’s ribs. They had been in Credence’s bed in his little room where Grindelwald swore that magic would stop anyone hearing the unholiness they got up to.)

He swallowed hard and buried the memory. Grindelwald was still discussing the Vendôme column and the fact that the non-magiques had yet to improve on a method for maintaining the sheen of bronze, which wizards had perfected in the middle ages for the care of their money. Credence wanted to interrupt him and say that he already knew about Napoleon and Austerlitz and the column because it had been completed the year after his arrival at Picpus, four years after his birth. This he knew only because he overhead the Mère Supérieurein discussion with the Abbott from the monastery of Picpus, which was not in Paris at all but in the surrounding countryside. He had listened through the keyhole in the door as they schemed to turn him over to the monks and thus extend his imprisonment well beyond the age of twenty-five, at which most orphans were thrust unceremoniously out into the world to fend for themselves. For whatever reason, the completion of the column had been the marker by which the Mère Supérieure had calculated his stay at the convent. He had been surprised, when he did the maths, to realise that he was already twenty-six.

Again the sensation of loneliness swelled in his chest, hollowed him out. The only creature he had to confide in, who could truly share in the dizzying change in circumstance that had brought him in the past four months from the agonies of the Petit Picpus to his new position, tucked comfortable between Grindelwald and Graves in an enclosed fiacre, was Pierre. Who could not speak. Who often crunched leaves of lettuce and old bread crusts at the highest possible volume of sound when Credence was trying to bare his soul. Who was currently on his back on the bottom of the carriage floor, legs flailing in an attempt to right himself. Who was a tortoise.

Grindelwald broke off suddenly.

“Your animal looks pained.”

“I told you that you should devise a form in your little code to let him know to keep the damned turtle at home,” said Graves, relighting his pipe. He dropped it again as Grindelwald began to tap his fingers along the edge of Credence’s knee.

“That won't be necessary. Credence will be reading full sentences soon enough. Won’t you, _Flöhchen_?”

“I hope to, m’sieur.”

“Of course he will,” said Grindelwald.

They were nearing the boundaries of his temper, when his voice began to stretch itself into the warning drawl, like the mouser before a pounce.

“Even magic has boundaries,” Graves muttered to himself.

“Have you ever heard, Credence,” said Grindelwald so softly that Credence was forced to lean in to hear him, his heart fluttering in his chest, his hand scrabbling for purchase on the flat of his lap. “Have you ever heard of the story of the Little Louse and the Little Flea? I thought not, but it is a non-magique story, _Läuschen und Flöhchen_. Would you like to know how it goes?”

Credence was aware of the stillness around him as he nodded his head. Graves, at his side, had barely taken a breath but jerked his hand against Credence’s thigh almost without seeming to have intended it. Grindelwald laid out the basic details of the plot. Louse and Flea were married, brewed beer, louse drowned. A child’s tragedy, the sort Credence reasoned most children would be better acquainted with than he.

He was good, though, and listened, as Grindelwald continued to the end of the tale when everything had begun to make noise in mourning the little louse until the river swelled and drowned them all. He had the feeling the story was not being told for his benefit but rather to make some sort of point on Graves, who had not moved since it began and who was staring very hard at the hand on Credence’s knee. Then Graves asked, was it necessary they all stay in the same carriage when Credence would have to go on alone to the house of Mme Josephine anyway?

“Credence will do as I say he does,” said Grindelwald simply.

It was plain to Credence that he considered himself to have won. Whatever his point was, it was made. The predatory cat in his voice had stretched out and fallen asleep. He smiled docilely. His bright eyes and even teeth gave him the appearance of a younger man. Handsome, good-natured. Humming, he patted Credence’s knee and added so lightly that it was almost lost to the thunder of a passing omnibus,

“And so will you, Percival. I wouldn’t like to have to remind you again to remember it.”


End file.
